t?"

Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the
dinner-table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest--a pheasant
proper--under the electric light in an alabaster globe. And outside,
the river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet
scents.

'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'

VI

DESPERATE

The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty to
the only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and ceremonies--the
reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of the
legacies--were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet of
age. Jolyon was cremated. By his special wish no one attended that
ceremony, or wore black for him. The succession of his property,
controlled to some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his widow in
possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred pounds a year
for life. Apart from this the two Wills worked together in some
complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's three children should
have an equal share in their grandfather's and father's property in the
future as in the present, save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex,
would have control of his capital when he was twenty-one, while June
and Holly would only have the spirit of theirs, in order that their
children might have the body after them. If they had no children, it
would all come to Jon if he outlived them; and since June was fifty,
and Holly nearly forty, it was considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that
but for the cruelty of income tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as
his grandfather when he died. All this was nothing to Jon, and little
enough to his mother. It was June who did everything needful for one
who had left his affairs in perfect order. When she had gone, and those
two were alone again in the great house, alone with death drawing them
together, and love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days
secretly disgusted and disappointed with himself. His mother would look
at him with a patient sadness which yet had in it an instinctive pride,
as if she were reserving her defence. If she smiled he was angry that
his answering smile should be so grudging and unnatural. He did not
judge or condemn her; that was all too remote--indeed, the idea of
doing so had never come to him. No! he was grudging and unnatural
because he couldn't have what he wanted because of her. There was one
alleviation--much to do in connection with